The Racial Statistics of Abortion Cannot Be Ignored

Dr. Christie was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban immigrant parents. At the age of five she moved to Guadalajara, Mexico while her mother studied medicine. She did her primary schooling there and returned to Miami at the age of twelve. She graduated from Columbia University in 1991 and the University of Miami Medical School in 1995, where she did her residency and fellowship. She sub-specialized in Musculoskeletal Radiology. She married a fellow medical student and had her first child during medical school, her second during residency, and her third during her fellowship. She had her fourth child while in private practice and adopted a fifth from China.

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A mother walks with her children to the MacArthur Park Primary Center School in Los Angeles Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013 (AP Photo)

I wonder if anyone is at all surprised that the charnel house of Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic in Philadelphia turns out to be just one of many across the country? Lila Rose, president of Live Action, is releasing several undercover videos that prove the fact. Located in the Bronx and Washington, D.C., these abortion centers share a matter-of-fact, if sickening, attitude toward babies that survive a late term abortion. They will be placed in a jar until they stop breathing, says a helpful worker at the Bronx clinic. They also share another troubling characteristic: they serve a mainly minority population.

Why is this troubling? As a Hispanic woman, I find the racial statistics of abortion deeply unsettling. Among white women, there were 138 abortions for every 1,000 births. Among black women, the number rises to a dizzying 501 abortions. Hispanic women account for 25% of all US abortions, though Hispanics make up just 16% of the population. While we hear a lot of agonizing over the high murder rate of minorities, we don’t hear much about the thinning of the minorities by abortion. Truly the most dangerous place for a black baby is in his mother’s womb, and a Hispanic baby is not far behind.

President Obama very recently lauded Planned Parenthood as an organization devoted to the welfare of women, presumably including minority women. Is he aware that the founder, Margaret Sanger, wrote in a 1939 letter: “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population?” And I wonder if he knows that the majority of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in communities with minority populations that exceed the city or state averages. Margaret Sanger’s vision of social purification was rooted in sterilization and birth control. Today’s Planned Parenthood is much more violent. It is now mainly devoted to pregnancy elimination, not prevention.

As Hispanics, we come to the United States looking for, and mainly finding, racial justice. But the slaughter of abortion has an ethnic component. The babies are mostly dark, and the abortionists are mostly white. That the mothers and sometimes fathers, grandmothers, and aunts of the children are complicit doesn’t really change the disturbing fact. I don’t at all believe that most abortion supporters are racists. I’m sure most of them feel that abortion is a great gift to the mother who finds herself in a tough situation. But these statistics should not be ignored by lovers of racial equality.

Not only does abortion thin the ranks of minorities by eliminating them before birth, but abortion attacks the moral fabric of an entire people. Jesse Jackson eloquently wrote, in 1977: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view. I believe that life is not private, but rather public and universal. If one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery.”

He has since famously changed his mind. But I agree with his former, wiser, self. If our belief in the rightness of our attitude, our mindset and our value system does not quake at the racist face of abortion, than the Civil Rights Movement was a struggle fought in vain: Abortion is NOT an equal opportunity killer.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to being a faithful Catholic voice in the public square.